Customer

Simple description: A recipient. Someone who receives something. The
output of any process goes to another process, which is the customer
process. The person in that process who receives the output is the
customer. When your customer gives you something, you are their
customer.

Pertinent description: The person who pays your salary. The person who
buys our products and services because they give them better value than
other all of the other competing products and services in the modern,
hyper-competitive marketplace.

Is the customer always right? No. Do they need to be treated as if they
right? In our businesses, probably, or something close to this. Customers
are the weak link of us producing products and services, supplying them to
the customer and them giving us back payment.

Some customers are more equal than others. In the end, we need profit,
not just customers, and some customers give us more value in exchange for
the value we give them. It makes sense, then, to focus our efforts more on
these high-value customers. Then only dilemma that this creates is that
those customers which are low-value today may be tomorrow's high-value
customers, which suggests that we should invest in value delivery to them
today for the promise of tomorrow.

In a competitive situation, the company which woos and wins customers
most successfully wins. Like wild animals wooing a mate, we must appear
most attractive and then deliver the superior goods we promise, lest they
desert us for the competitor who constantly whispers in their ear about
greater things.

The quality job thus means both understanding what customers want and
ensuring that we, at minimum, deliver what we promise.